Reading upside down
Sep. 1st, 2007 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWhen should one stop doing science?
Or, to put it another way, what precisely did Torchwood One do wrong?
Torchwood's job is to investigate unusual phenomena with an eye to understanding and using them. They poke at stars and magic until they get a patent out of it. There's also a side order of making sure nobody gets turned into a werewolf or blown up or something.
Most of the stuff I've read about the whole Cyberman invasion just assumes that Torchwood screwed up. And, okay, the result was *hugely* bad. But... when, precisely, was the screwup?
Torchwood had an unusual phenomenon, a rift. If it's anything like the Cardiff rift it was spitting out random junk off and on for as long as it had been there. They found it, located it precisely, because it was being weird. They didn't make it. They found this potentially dangerous definitely weird thing and they started to investigate.
So far, so good.
The investigation, many years after the tower went up, reached the point where they were going to poke it and see what happens.
Is this their job? Well, if their main priority is containing alien threats, putting stuff in boxes and making it go away, then no. But in that case they're not much of an institute. So, yeah, this is probably their job. It's certainly the job they've been doing. They pull stuff apart, figure it out, then invent.
So, they poke the rift.
A ball falls out.
They have no clue what it is, so they investigate with every tool available, and then start inventing more. They still have no clue when the Doctor turns up, but on the plus side it's been sitting there doing absolutely nothing for the whole time, so they haven't got any clues that suggest it is dangerous. It just kind of exists. This isn't really a reason to stop investigating, or even poking the rift more. Maybe another one will fall out. Never know until you try.
There were also the ghosts.
Now you might consider that a reason to stop doing what they're doing.
Why?
If you push a button and something blows up, that's a dangerous result that suggests you shouldn't push the button again.
If you push a button and get fuzzy shadowy things everywhere... Is that dangerous?
Well if they've been wandering around for months and everyone's treating them like some kind of amusing pop culture reference, probably not so much.
So should they have stopped investigating then?
No harm, no foul, keep going.
Right?
Especially since they're also getting a whole ton of good data and useful Stuff out of the experiment. They're getting masses of electricity. They're also, and this is pretty important, learning how to control the rift, in a crude sort of way. Open, close, open, close, wheee! Er, I mean, they've got a lever that can shut the rift. Isn't that kind of cool? They've got a machine that can, with a bit of reprogramming, make the thing permanently seal. Isn't that bloody impressive, given the tech level? They've done masses of research to get that far! And since stuff falls out of rifts even when you *don't* poke them, having a way of sealing it is veryvery useful.
Okay, possibly the London phenomenon had nothing much to do with the Cardiff one and would only have spat stuff out if poked.
How do you know?
Well, watch it for a long time (done) and then poke it (also done).
So far, what have they done wrong?
So then the Doctor turns up. They've been set up to arrest him, and when he turns up in their highly secure building they finally get around to doing so. Fair enough.
(really, fair. he doesn't *actually* have the right to wander around everywhere he pleases, he just acts like he does and often gets away with it. Sometimes people wouldn't want him in their place, actually, thanks very much.)
So they arrest him in a very polite way, show him lots of shiny stuff, and then when he gives advice they take it.
No, really, they did. He said stop, they stop.
And, yeah, it turns out to be too late and they're all dooooooomed.
But... which bit was a mistake?
Well they erred in their risk assessment of the ghosts. The cybermen infiltrated the tower without anyone noticing. Should they have been noticed? Really they should. Don't know how they weren't. So somebody in security made a mistake, some data was not available, and cybermen sneaked in their blind spot.
So Torchwood's mistake was not, in fact, to play with the big levers and shiny wall and all that. It was to have the builders in and put all that plastic up. Not enough CCTV, was the thing.
... yeah, you can pretty much tell where my fic has been wandering around in lately.
It's just... if you line up the Christmas Invasion and this with the Cybermen, and start trying to find precisely where the mistake was, it can come out looking like it was really 'being insufficiently worshipful of the Doctor', which is rather uncool. Because otherwise people were acting in logical ways, given their job responsibilities. It just went kind of wrong.
Sometimes things go wrong without anyone actually making a mistake.
Which is rather scarier than Daleks, really, when you think about it.
Or, to put it another way, what precisely did Torchwood One do wrong?
Torchwood's job is to investigate unusual phenomena with an eye to understanding and using them. They poke at stars and magic until they get a patent out of it. There's also a side order of making sure nobody gets turned into a werewolf or blown up or something.
Most of the stuff I've read about the whole Cyberman invasion just assumes that Torchwood screwed up. And, okay, the result was *hugely* bad. But... when, precisely, was the screwup?
Torchwood had an unusual phenomenon, a rift. If it's anything like the Cardiff rift it was spitting out random junk off and on for as long as it had been there. They found it, located it precisely, because it was being weird. They didn't make it. They found this potentially dangerous definitely weird thing and they started to investigate.
So far, so good.
The investigation, many years after the tower went up, reached the point where they were going to poke it and see what happens.
Is this their job? Well, if their main priority is containing alien threats, putting stuff in boxes and making it go away, then no. But in that case they're not much of an institute. So, yeah, this is probably their job. It's certainly the job they've been doing. They pull stuff apart, figure it out, then invent.
So, they poke the rift.
A ball falls out.
They have no clue what it is, so they investigate with every tool available, and then start inventing more. They still have no clue when the Doctor turns up, but on the plus side it's been sitting there doing absolutely nothing for the whole time, so they haven't got any clues that suggest it is dangerous. It just kind of exists. This isn't really a reason to stop investigating, or even poking the rift more. Maybe another one will fall out. Never know until you try.
There were also the ghosts.
Now you might consider that a reason to stop doing what they're doing.
Why?
If you push a button and something blows up, that's a dangerous result that suggests you shouldn't push the button again.
If you push a button and get fuzzy shadowy things everywhere... Is that dangerous?
Well if they've been wandering around for months and everyone's treating them like some kind of amusing pop culture reference, probably not so much.
So should they have stopped investigating then?
No harm, no foul, keep going.
Right?
Especially since they're also getting a whole ton of good data and useful Stuff out of the experiment. They're getting masses of electricity. They're also, and this is pretty important, learning how to control the rift, in a crude sort of way. Open, close, open, close, wheee! Er, I mean, they've got a lever that can shut the rift. Isn't that kind of cool? They've got a machine that can, with a bit of reprogramming, make the thing permanently seal. Isn't that bloody impressive, given the tech level? They've done masses of research to get that far! And since stuff falls out of rifts even when you *don't* poke them, having a way of sealing it is veryvery useful.
Okay, possibly the London phenomenon had nothing much to do with the Cardiff one and would only have spat stuff out if poked.
How do you know?
Well, watch it for a long time (done) and then poke it (also done).
So far, what have they done wrong?
So then the Doctor turns up. They've been set up to arrest him, and when he turns up in their highly secure building they finally get around to doing so. Fair enough.
(really, fair. he doesn't *actually* have the right to wander around everywhere he pleases, he just acts like he does and often gets away with it. Sometimes people wouldn't want him in their place, actually, thanks very much.)
So they arrest him in a very polite way, show him lots of shiny stuff, and then when he gives advice they take it.
No, really, they did. He said stop, they stop.
And, yeah, it turns out to be too late and they're all dooooooomed.
But... which bit was a mistake?
Well they erred in their risk assessment of the ghosts. The cybermen infiltrated the tower without anyone noticing. Should they have been noticed? Really they should. Don't know how they weren't. So somebody in security made a mistake, some data was not available, and cybermen sneaked in their blind spot.
So Torchwood's mistake was not, in fact, to play with the big levers and shiny wall and all that. It was to have the builders in and put all that plastic up. Not enough CCTV, was the thing.
... yeah, you can pretty much tell where my fic has been wandering around in lately.
It's just... if you line up the Christmas Invasion and this with the Cybermen, and start trying to find precisely where the mistake was, it can come out looking like it was really 'being insufficiently worshipful of the Doctor', which is rather uncool. Because otherwise people were acting in logical ways, given their job responsibilities. It just went kind of wrong.
Sometimes things go wrong without anyone actually making a mistake.
Which is rather scarier than Daleks, really, when you think about it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-01 02:54 pm (UTC)Maybe - they still should have investigated the ghosts a lot more throughly. It's like when the Curies discovered those glowing rocks - and then realized that handing uranium even in tiny amounts was gave them cancer and made even their cookbooks deadly to handle.
But, yeah, their main flaw was building security.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-01 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-01 04:12 pm (UTC)The problem wasn't in having insufficient security to prevent infiltration--any security can be circumvented, especially in a speculative fiction television show. There will never be such a thing as sufficient security to prevent infilitration, ever, and to chase too hard after it is to waste one's resources on a pipe dream. The problem was in having something to circumvent, in particular that particularly type of target. The problem wasn't that they didn't have enough CCTV, but too much of it. The problem lay in the mission statement of Torchwood itself, which privileged secrecy in such a way as to make the battle at Canary Wharf possible.
The more they'd try to tighten their grip, the more, erm, star systems would slip through
Grand Moff Tarkin'stheir fingers.no subject
Date: 2007-09-01 11:51 pm (UTC)But how specifically would Torchwood being unsecret mean there was no battle?
I mean, they couldn't have told people about cybermen and daleks cause they didn't know.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-02 02:13 am (UTC)lmao. Mostly I agree with you. The Doctor could have avoided all sorts of mayhem and violence in many of the episodes if he'd only shared some info with those around him and he never does.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 03:55 am (UTC)of course if he started sharing what he knows he'd be there a few hundred years, and massively alter the timeline. and quite often he's figuring it out as he goes along too.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-02 04:35 pm (UTC)Why?
Erm... Because you've got no idea what you're playing with and your games are having a worldwide effect?
The fact that after pulling the shiny lever they got ghosts all around the planet is reason enough to stop all experiments until they either understood what the ghosts where or were able to confine the phenomenon to a place under their control. You never can be thorough enough when checking a new shiny for dangerousness, and you've got no right to put other people (in this case, read - civilians) into possible danger. Play with bombs all you want, as long as when they go 'boom!' you're the only one who gets blown up, that's the first rule of safety engineering in science =)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 03:54 am (UTC)Yeah, I agree with you, except for when I'm writing from a Torchwood One point of view. :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 06:24 am (UTC)And from what we were shown in the series, it seemed as if they were poking at the rift exactly in the hopes that something interesting will fall out. Since their primary objective is defense of GB population against alien threats, they were doubly obligated to stop playing with the shiny. ==> Bad, bad Torchwood.
See? No connection with Doctor worship =)
still actually agreeing with you but Torchwood wouldn't
Date: 2007-09-03 10:17 am (UTC)is defense their primary objective? UNIT defends, Torchwood investigates.
Re: still actually agreeing with you but Torchwood wouldn't
Date: 2007-09-03 11:30 am (UTC)"When I founded the Torchwood Institute, 20 short years ago, it was with the single hope that you would protect us from attacks originating beyond this world." (c) Queen Victoria's Speech, available on Torchwood site.
And how does one actually estimate absence of danger? Given their work, I thought their attitude to everything alien ought to be a combination of Queen Victoria's distrust and fear and Suzie's "weevils and bollocks and shit", i.e. they should always assume the worst and keep on assuming until the strange thing either goes away or is locked away/blown up by them...
Re: still actually agreeing with you but Torchwood wouldn't
Date: 2007-09-03 11:36 am (UTC)... yup, that would be their job then.
they do seem to assume the worst about most things. I guess they've had more than a hundred years of being able to cope with it, more or less, which would rather take the edge of the fear, in an institutional sort of way. Individuals are probably displaying a healthy degree of fear or dead... or in charge of a desk and getting promoted for their positive attitude.
Re: still actually agreeing with you but Torchwood wouldn't
Date: 2007-09-03 11:45 am (UTC)Voila! I'd say that's where It All Went Wrong :D